I had been telephoning a good deal since I’d come back to London. No matter what she’d said to me when we were last together, she was my mother and I knew she worried about me. “Chérie, you must have some kind of plan,” she’d ventured a few weeks ago. “We’ll meet, we’ll all talk—”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to come back to New York.”
It was a sign of just how nervous my mother was that she didn’t argue. “Then we’ll come to London. Your father has business there very soon, anyway. I’ll come with him, and we’ll all sit down and make some plans.”
I already had plans. I’d been refining them these past weeks while sharing Finn’s little bed-sit. We worried about Eve, going almost every day to her house to knock, but it wasn’t just Eve we talked about over our one-pan breakfasts. It was the Rosebud, for whom I was slowly acquiring a proper layette. It was the future and how we could manage it, Finn outlining ideas and me scribbling figures on my bank statements to see how those ideas could be made a reality (and the bankers had no trouble allowing me to withdraw my own money, once I came in with my false wedding ring on). But I wasn’t sure how interested my parents were going to be in my plans. So I prepared for them to tell me what course of action they had decided on, and prepared to say no. Whether I was still underage or not, they were going to find out I was not nearly as easy to push around as I used to be. Facing a pistol-wielding murderer does tend to put parents further down the list of things to be intimidated by.
Still, I was afraid this meeting would go awry once I put my foot down, and I didn’t want it to go awry. In spite of everything, I missed my parents. I wanted to tell them I was sorry I’d caused so much trouble, that I understood better now how losing James had wrecked them so utterly. I wanted to say how much I wanted them back.
“You’re sure you want me to come?” Finn wore the charcoal gray suit he’d worn in Grasse as Donald McGowan, solicitor. (My Donald!) “Your mother didn’t have a very good first impression of me in Roubaix.”
“You’re not getting out of it that easy, Finn Kilgore. Let’s go.”
He grinned. “I’ll hail a cab.” The Lagonda was back in the shop, where Finn, when he wasn’t repairing other peoples’ cars, was at work rebuilding her engine. The final dash from Paris really had been too much for the old girl, more’s the pity. It would have given me a great dose of confidence, gliding up to the Dorchester in the Lagonda. She might be scrap metal under the hood, but she was still all style.
I picked up my hat, a really stunning black confection I’d splurged on because I remembered Eve shaking her head over the queen of spies’s passion for morally questionable hats. This little puff of black gauze and feathers was definitely morally questionable, and I smiled as I tilted it over one eye. “Very nice, Yank,” I imagined Eve saying, and felt the usual lurch in my stomach. The company that had put her house up for sale couldn’t tell us anything; they’d received their instructions by telegram. All we could do was leave a note with Finn’s address, begging her to contact us, and go by the house whenever possible to see if we might catch sight of her. All we’d sighted, a week ago, was a notice on the door that the house had been sold.
Where are you? It was something Eve seemed content to let us wonder. On the days I wasn’t terrified she was dead, I wanted to kill her myself for making me so afraid.
“Charlie lass.” Finn’s voice from the open door sounded strange. “Come look at this.”
I took my pocketbook and joined him at the doorstep. Anything I was about to say died in my throat as I looked out. Sitting low and rakish at the curb outside was an absolute stunner of a car. It gleamed in the morning sun: a convertible in glittering, patrician silver.
“The ’46 Bentley Mark VI,” Finn whispered, moving toward it like a sleepwalker. “Four and a half liter engine . . . independent front suspension by helical springs . . . divided propeller shaft . . .”